


standing here (so close to me)

by lattely (orphan_account)



Series: ri's quarantine productions [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bittersweet, Canonical Character Death, Comic Book Science, Established Relationship, Fake Character Death, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Retirement, natasha got the funeral she deserved, not as much angst as the acceptance stage of grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:22:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23857552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/lattely
Summary: Bucky has missed the warm rumble of his baritone in the weeks he’s been back dotting all the I’s at the Compound with Sam and the remnants of the team. Making sure all the gears were perfectly oiled before he joined Steve in the long awaited retirement.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: ri's quarantine productions [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1759390
Comments: 16
Kudos: 76





	standing here (so close to me)

**Author's Note:**

> apparently a year has passed since i cried my brains out through my eyes in a theatre chair, watching the shitshow that was endgame unfold before me. but hey - i came out the other side, gay as ever, and the russos can stick it.
> 
> fic inspired by [this post](https://crvggio.tumblr.com/post/184063683786/i-want-steve-to-get-a-fake-out-death-i-want-them) by [viviana](https://crvggio.tumblr.com/). very much unbetaed; any mistakes are my own.
> 
> title from _it's been a long, long time_ , because i'm nothing if not predictable.

He’s there when they walk in - taking a young dark-haired woman’s order, dressed in dark jeans and a black polo that, as usual, doesn’t fit him under the stupid green apron.

There’s no queue, so they settle to wait behind the girl. She’s got a pink satchel slung over her shoulder, a thick folder clutched in the hand that’s not handing over her credit card. College aged, probably, stopping for a power-up before heading to an afternoon class.

They don’t duck their heads - no one cares about the Avengers these days, not anymore, and it’s possibly the best thing that might have happened to either of them.

“I wanna piss him off,” Sam says under his breath. “How many pumps of caramel should I ask for?”

Bucky snorts. “Fifteen. Go all out.”

“Alright,” Sam flashes his gap-toothed grin. “Fifteen pumps of caramel, six shots, extra whip.”

“God, that’s nasty.”

“Exactly my goal, man.”

The girl walks aside to wait for her drink and they step up to the counter. Joyful recognition flashes over Steve’s face, but he wipes it away as quickly as it came, clearing his throat and giving them a pleasant customers-only smile Bucky knows from working at the butcher’s in ‘34, when he had to pull a facsimile of friendliness over his face for a lady who demanded a pound of beef even though he’s told her three times already that they were out.

“Hello, what can I get for you today?” Steve says. Bucky has missed the warm rumble of his baritone in the weeks he’s been back dotting all the I’s at the Compound with Sam and the remnants of the team. Making sure all the gears were perfectly oiled before he joined Steve in the long awaited retirement. Sam has the shield now, and new recruits are being trained under the watchful eye of Hill and Fury; the security of the world has been put in the most capable of hands.

“Grande iced latte with two pumps of vanilla, please,” Bucky says, and it’s such a dumb fucking thing to be saying to order a goddamn coffee that he almost guffaws right then and there, catching the answering twinkle in Steve’s eye.

“A tall Americano with a shot of milk for me,” Sam follows. Bucky shoots him a betrayed glare, but Sam only shrugs. The, _If I’m paying five dollars for a coffee, I want to actually be able to stomach it_ comes across with no words necessary.

They pay and move away to wait much like the girl had, leaving Steve to serve his next customer, a teenage boy. Their drinks are made and put down in front of them by Steve’s colleague, a tall Black woman with a bleached buzz cut and winged eyeliner so sharp it could kill, who gives them a small uptick of her glossy mouth before gliding off to foam milk in a stainless steel pitcher.

They wait for Steve outside, leaning on the bollards; they know he works the morning shift on Thursdays and he’ll head out once the clock strikes two PM in a couple of minutes. Surely enough, he’s out the door in no time, stuffing his apron into his backpack, grinning at them both like a madman.

“God, it’s so good to see you guys,” he says and goes to grab Sam in a bearhug, clapping his back soundly as Bucky watches on in amusement.

“Ditto, dude. Being dead is treating you well, I see,” Sam laughs, squeezing Steve’s shoulder when he pulls back.

Steve’s eyes zero in on Bucky then, and Bucky can’t help but smile.

“Hi, Stevie,” he says. It comes out softer than he anticipated, but he doesn’t care, because he’s standing in the heart of Cobble Hill with the late spring sun shining down warm and bright, and there’s finally no threat to be kept at bay. Just him, his pain-in-the-ass vice best friend, and the man Bucky married under the plentiful spread of Wakandan stars, when the times were simpler in Bucky’s unique understanding of the word.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve returns. “You cut your hair.”

Bucky runs his hand through the freshly shorn curls on top, the buzzed back and sides. “A fresh start. Got some weight off my shoulders,” he jokes. “You grew back the beard.”

“Helps me blend in,” Steve replies. The beard suits him; makes him look less like America’s once-beloved poster boy, but a strong man who has handled two lifetimes of torture with his chin held high, and is slowly but surely getting himself back.

Plus, the coarse hair feels great scratching up Bucky’s thighs, but that is neither here nor there.

“Jesus, no wonder it took y’all seventy years to tie the knot,” Sam mutters. They ignore him.

“I’ve missed you, sweetheart.” Steve moves close, then closer still. He rests his big hands in the crest of Bucky’s lower back, closes his eyes when Bucky wraps his arms around his shoulders and plays with the overgrown blond strands at the nape of his neck.

“I’ve missed you, too, honey,” Bucky says, at a murmur now. “So much.”

Steve nuzzles at Bucky’s clean-shaven jaw, hides a kiss just below the jut of his cheekbone. “You got your stuff?” he asks.

“In Sam’s car,” Bucky nods, and with no further preamble, kisses Steve.

Steve’s lips are warm, soft, with a lingering taste of chai as he relearns Bucky after a month of separation, and when his tongue comes out to sweep at the seam of Bucky’s mouth, Bucky opens up for him with a barely-muffled whimper, tightening his arms around Steve’s neck, carding his fingers through his hair. It’s different than nearly a century ago, and yet the same, because for all that they’ve both changed, the press of their lips remains a constant - the place from which their universe spirals outwards, then and now.

“Cool, it’s not like I’m standing right here or something,” Sam says, but when they part at the admonishment, he’s entirely too fond in the face to really be begrudging. “Come get your shit, I’ve got important dinner plans with the family and my mom won’t let me get dessert if I’m late. I swear, she still thinks I’m five.”

“Your ma is the greatest woman I’ve met this life around, I won’t have you say one bad word about her,” Steve reproves, threading his fingers through Bucky’s as they all troop towards Sam’s beat-up Corolla parked some sixty feet away.

“Man, you know I love her to pieces, but being woken up for school by her for ten years straight puts some shit into perspective for you.”

“Her cherry cobbler, though? Worth it.”

They get Bucky’s duffel from Sam’s car and bid him goodbye, making him promise to give his mom their good wishes, and they watch the grey Toyota drive away until it disappears around the corner.

Steve nods at the bag in Bucky’s grip. “That’s all?”

“Yeah,” Bucky smiles, a bit wistful. “Never really had the time to make a home for myself anywhere.” And it’s true - between nursing himself to sanity in a new hideout every month, paranoid and near-feral, and faithfully stepping into a world-saving fight at Steve’s side, he never got the chance to settle. The closest he ever came was the Wakandan countryside, but even then he’d been plagued by a sense of vague unease; a feeling that he didn’t belong, though everyone assured him he was welcome.

Steve’s eyes soften, the cerulean blue sparkling in the sunlight, sadness and hope and a hesitant rapture dancing in his irises at the admission. “That changes now,” he says, and makes a grabby gesture at the duffel. “Give it.”

“I can carry it myself,” Bucky laughs, but dutifully hands the bag over. Steve gets a kick out of helping people; it’s a simple thing to humor.

“How long have you been in the city?” Steve asks after they’ve been walking for a minute or two. He lives fifteen minutes on foot from that godforsaken Starbucks he works at for reasons Bucky suspects are, one: to spite everyone who’s ever known him, and two: to spite himself. He’s told Bucky that he finds ways to misspell the simplest of names sometimes, just for the fun of it, and honestly, being a barista at an overpriced chain is far from the weirdest thing he’s ever done. It’s domestic, in a way. Normal, finally.

“We drove in yesterday night,” Bucky says. “Visited Natasha this morning.”

Out the corner of Bucky’s eye, Steve’s jaw tightens, hardly perceptible. Wordlessly, Bucky squeezes his hand, runs his thumb over his roughened knuckles.

In his few years of knowing her, Romanoff and Bucky never grew particularly close, but he’s aware she was incredibly dear to Steve. He loved her like family, and her loss hit him the hardest, maybe ex aequo with Clint Barton. Steve couldn’t be there when they all buried her among the bare, snow-covered trees of the Trinity Church’s Cemetery - she had made her home in Manhattan, according to Barton, and it’s what she would have wanted. He sobbed in Bucky’s arms later, though, when Bucky came down from the small ceremony to visit Steve in the apartment they would share in the future.

Over six months have passed since then, and they’re on their way to the very place. As such, Steve takes a deep breath and smiles, his eyes shining with the residual grief that has morphed into reverence, now.

“I brought orange chrysanthemums to her grave last weekend,” he says. His voice doesn’t shake.

“They’re still there. We put them in fresh water,” Bucky replies. “Lit her a vigil light, too. A purple one.”

“She liked purple.”

“I know.”

In the silence they lapse into, they pass an abundant fruit stand shadowed by a white-and-red striped awning, manned by a balding middle-aged fella. A pregnant woman is sifting through apples with uncanny diligence, her green polka-dotted sundress stretching over the swell of her belly, and Bucky thinks, _oh._ Life has a way of curving in on itself; in the wake of a tragedy, no matter how enormous, the joy of a new beginning will follow, over and over again. It’s the world’s way - everything is rebuilt, in one way or another. Someone’s loss is balanced with someone else’s gain. An equilibrium older than time.

“We have to pick Coke up from her daycare,” Steve brings Bucky out from his peaceful turmoil.

“I still can’t get over how you named the poor dog after fucking _cocaine_ ,” Bucky says.

Two months after Natasha’s funeral, Steve adopted a one-year-old Samoyed from a shelter in Queens. She’s a menace who chews through everything in sight and gets white fur on every available surface, somehow including the inside of sealed cans. Bucky loves her like crazy.

“Come on, it’s funny!” Steve counters, defensive. Bucky finds it inadequately hilarious.

“Couldn’t you have gone with Flour or something?”

“Flour wouldn’t scandalize soccer moms in Central Park.”

“You’re such a little shit.”

Steve only laughs, raising their conjoined hands to his mouth to kiss Bucky’s vibranium fingers cloaked by the holographic impression of skin.

It’s not exactly crowded when they enter the daycare, but there’s enough people to call it bustling - a teenage couple holding hands and a brindle greyhound sitting at their feet, a mom accompanied by two young sons and their pug, a harried-looking East Asian man with his German boxer, among a handful of others.

“Good afternoon, Reyes,” Steve says when they step up to the reception desk. Reyes, a Hispanic guy no older than twenty five, looks up from clicking through his PC and gives them a disarming smile, his septum piercing glinting in the overhead light.

“Hi, Mr Leaf!” he says brightly. Bucky barely holds back his scream of anguish; of all names Steve could have chosen, of _course_ he picked ‘Leaf’. Years of being a legendary operative under his star-spangled belt, and he’s still the least subtle person Bucky’s ever met. Christ almighty. “Here to pick up Coke?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Was she any trouble?”

“Not at all!” Reyes shakes his head, to Bucky’s astonishment. Coke is hell on four furry legs, and the only time she’s ‘no trouble’ is when she’s conked out after playing a vicious game of tug of war. “Here, sign your name and the time, I’ll go fetch her.” Reyes passes Steve an attendance sheet pinned to a clipboard and slips away to the back.

While Steve’s jotting down his name in the indicated box, a senior lady sidles up to them, a tiny pinscher cradled in her thin, papery hands. Her silver hair falls over her ears in a short bob, and her hazel eyes are so overwhelmingly kind that Bucky can’t even find it in himself to feel wary of her.

“Hello! I’m so sorry to intrude,” she greets them, the wrinkles by her eyes deepening when she smiles.

Looking up from the chart, Steve dons the perfectly amicable expression he only ever wears around small children and the elderly. Something about catering to their vulnerability, he always explains. “Hi, ma’am. May I help you with something?” he says, and while someone else would sound sarcastic, he’s entirely sincere.

“Oh, no,” she waves her hand with its impeccable mauve nails in dismissal. “It’s just- you probably get that a lot, but you look just like Steve Rogers.” Her smile turns plaintive as she scratches her pinscher behind the ear. “God rest his soul.”

Momentarily, Steve’s fingers twitch around the cheap pen, so minute that only Bucky, trained in every smallest movement of his body, would have noticed. “I’ve been told, yes,” he says. “May he rest in peace.”

“Such a good man he was,” she nods, half to herself. “Have a good day, boys,” she adds, and totters away before they can as much as blink.

Bucky rubs a circle into Steve’s side where his metal hand is splayed over the ribs he used to be able to count.

After the final battle against Thanos, after Stark’s sepulture, Steve sat down on the waterside bench flanked by Bucky and Sam, and entrusted them with the returning of the Infinity Stones. Passing the shield down to Sam, he clued them in on his grand departure plan.

The following night, in one of the many guest bedrooms of the widowed Pepper Potts’ lakefront cabin, Steve swallowed a carefully calculated dose of the beta stoppers Dr Banner had once developed for the Hulk and never did end up using. The stoppers slowed his heart down enough that when Bucky alerted everyone to Steve’s state in the small hours of the morning, Banner’s examination declared Steve deceased.

Banner had speculated the causes, later; internal injuries no one knew about, exhaustion that had reached its peak, side effects of the finally-malfunctioning serum. He’d looked so distressed that Bucky almost told him it was all a fluke.

Miss Potts scheduled Steve’s burial for the very next afternoon. Sam and Bucky stood alone over the open casket in an empty room of the funeral home, granted their last look at the not-quite-corpse in its tailored suit, and if Steve hadn’t woken up in the next few seconds, the quantity of possibly-lethal medicine proven indeed perfectly measured, Bucky’s sure he would have fainted, or threw up, or both. Because Steve really had looked dead - with the bluish hue of his skin and the fold of his hands over his chest, he’d been a block of ice again. It reminded Bucky of _Romeo and Juliet_ , in a perverse way.

Steve had risen out of the white silken lining and slunk out the backdoor with a still-cold kiss to Bucky’s hand, unnoticed by everyone. Sam and Bucky had slammed the lid of the coffin closed, never to be opened again, and called for the undertaker.

Surrounded by reporters and mourning throngs, the two of them carried the casket to its freshly dug grave at the Cypress Hills National Cemetery, for no one to wise up to the fact that it was two hundred and forty pounds too light. No one questioned it; Bucky is, in fact, a supersoldier.

Romanoff had been inhumed a week later, after Sam had recovered her body from Vormir.

Some weekend in February, when Bucky had managed to escape tying together loose ends upstate, he’d said, lying in bed next to Steve in the newly-purchased Brooklyn apartment, _You have two graves._ The grand monument at Arlington and now another at Cypress Hills.

Steve had answered, _I’ll share the third one with you,_ and kissed Bucky’s neck, a street lamp painting a pale orange stripe across the sheets.

In the present, Reyes emerges from the back with Coke on her red leash. Upon spotting Steve and Bucky, she tugs Reyes forward so forcefully that she rips the leash from his hand. She makes a furious dash across the room and jumps up onto her hind legs to prop her paws on Bucky’s thighs, slobbering all over his face once he crouches down for her.

“She’s missed you,” Steve grins beside them, ruffling Coke’s fluffy head.

“Vice versa,” Bucky laughs as he dodges Coke’s wet tongue licking over his chin. “Did you pay?”

Steve nods. “In advance, when I dropped her off.” He takes an exaggerated step back when, to Coke’s protests, Bucky gets to his feet and leans in for a kiss. “Not when you’re covered in dog spit, mister.”

Bucky gives him a pout, flicking his ear, and grabs Coke’s leash. “Let’s go home, then,” he says.

And they do.


End file.
